Physical Activity of Older People

Today I’m going to brag a little. For several months now I have been going to a one-hour work out three times a week at the local recreation center. The reason I started this is because the instructor of this class has a reputation for being demanding, and concentrating on the “abs” (abdominal muscles). I was quite a bit leery of this group as I am, by 15 years I would guess, the oldest woman there. The instructor, however, is 74. Thirty push-ups??!! Form is not the best but I am hanging in there, and no knees allowed. So physically, how much can we do as we age? I don’t know, but we can do push-ups. I also see several older men running around the track there, but I don’t know their ages.

A friend recently sent me an article titled, “Maybe age really is just a number.” The date and the name of the paper are cut off but Hope Yen of the Associated Press wrote it. She notes that the world population of centenarians is growing and “challenging views of what it means to be old.” There are, of course, many implications of what this will mean, depending on whether they (we) are healthy or frail. But what caught my eye is the picture of a 100-year-old woman shown throwing a bowling ball.

What can we expect to do at different ages? It seems to me we hear more about life in a nursing home, or what our bodies can’t do than about what they can. Since I have experience in hiking long distances, I did a search on the oldest A.T. thru-hiker. According to an article by Megan Gambino at Smithsonian.com, July 14, 2009, the oldest thru-hiker was an 81-year-old man. And there was another man who started section hiking the A.T. when he was 82 and finished at the age of 86.

Grandma Gatewood, Peace Pilgrim, and Granny D are three well known women who did physically demanding activities in their 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.

Granny D was concerned about campaign finance reform, set out at the age of 89 to walk across the country. Starting in California, she walked through the dessert, climbed the Appalachian Range in blizzard conditions, and even skied 100 miles after a historic snowfall made roadside walking impossible. She arrived in Washington D.C. when she was 92, 3,200 miles in all. Peace Pilgrim, at the age of 60, was the first woman to thru-hike the A.T. When she was 61, she began hiking across the United States, and was on her seventh crossing when she was killed in an automobile accident within days of her 73rd birthday.

Grandma Gatewood is a legend in the hiker community. She hiked the entire Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine in 1954 when she was 67, and did it again when she 69, completing the distance in 4 1/2 months. She went on to hike many other trails, too numerous to describe here. She did not have the advantage of the lightweight gear that I did.

The mother of a friend of mine is 92. She exercises regularly, including time on the treadmill, and always volunteers to bring a dish to a potluck dinner. My friend recently took her to renew her driver’s license. She was armed with a certificate from her optometrist saying she could see well enough to drive. The clerk couldn’t read the doctor’s writing so she had to take the eye exam there anyway. She passed it, the daughter doesn’t know how, but still had to prove she was who she said she was, and that she was a U.S. citizen (and not a terrorist for example). She easily proved who she was but had some trouble with the citizenship until she located her birth certificate in a safe. They returned with it to the examination location and another clerk scrutinized “the ragged little piece of deteriorating paper, then finally declared it was good.” She passed and waved goodbye, advising them she would see them again in four years.

I did a quick search to find out what people over 70 were doing. I discovered these two studies. The first is from a study I found on the BBC Web site. It states,“ In general, levels of physical activity were very low among most people of both sexes aged over 70. More than 70 percent of the people who took part in the study walked for fewer than 5,000 steps a day. And, women were more likely to be less active than men.” The other is an article titled, “Anticipated Exertion, or Exercise Activities Among Women Over 70.” This article claims that only 30 percent of women over the age of 65 participated in any aerobic activity for at least 30 minutes every other day. We need some role models here.

When will the accomplishments of older people be seen as the norm and not the exception?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nancy Gowler

Nancy is 73 and happily lives alone in a small North Carolina mountain town. Life wasn’t always this way. In 1999 she broke free from a toxic marriage by deciding to hike the Appalachian Trail. The hike...read more

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